Every time I meet my dad, I think about how fortunate I am to have such a good role model in life. Hard-working but relaxed, helpful but trusting, and deeply compassionate but properly silly, Dad has informed most of what is good about me. (My faults I can only blame on my poor decision-making.)
Of course, young men can also be influenced by the women in their lives. I think my mum taught me to take a keen interest in the world (even if we drew different conclusions). To the extent that I am independent-minded I think it had a lot to do with knowing my maverick aunty Ally.
I could go on. But the reason I’m thinking about this is the modern obsession with “positive role models”. Politicians and educators are desperate to show young people, and especially young men, celebrities who embody wholesome and, in their minds, healthy traits. The sinister influence of online personalities like Andrew Tate has only made this desperation more feverish.
Sometimes, their examples are hilarious. (Trans actor Elliot Page is the latest case.) But the whole endeavour is futile and depressing. Young men should not need Marcus Rashford and Harry Styles to be “positive role models” for them. They should have people around them.
Alas, young people often don’t have people around them. A quarter of children grow up with a single parent, of course, but that is just the beginning. Smaller families mean that young people have fewer aunts and uncles. Withering social networks mean that young people have fewer friends (and friends can often be a bigger influence than relatives). The decline of churchgoing, sports participation and apprenticeships means that — tragically imperfect — avenues for mentoring have closed.
Any conversation about “influence” must acknowledge that our personalities have genetic as well as environmental influences. As much as being around my mum and dad influenced me, for example, they would have influenced me even if there had been some kind of tragic mix-up in the hospital and I had been raised by someone else.
Still, the decline of young people’s relationships is concerning — and it is understandable to be a bit depressed about the sort of frauds and freaks they look up to online. But the desperate search for “positive role models” in the media is no kind of solution. Firstly, famous people are not in young people’s lives. They have no connection with their individual struggles and aspirations. They cannot mentor them any more than they can fix their bikes.
The desire for famous people who “model” positive behaviour is cripplingly superficial
Secondly, the desire for famous people who “model” positive behaviour is cripplingly superficial. Sure, I might disagree with modern educators on what counts as good behaviour. But the deeper problem is that famous people show us a surface-level glimpse of themselves — often with the need for good PR in mind. What seems like a good father and husband might be sleeping with prostitutes and beating dogs behind the scenes. Beyond this, though, we do not really see how famous people deal with the struggles of their lives, any more than seeing someone’s Instagram profile offers an accurate portrayal of their existence. We tend to see exactly what they want us to see.
I suspect that the demand for famous people to be “role models” also has a bad influence on their fields. Sure, I don’t want actors to be staging hate crimes and football players to be sleeping with their brothers’ wives. But actors should be acting well and football players should be playing well before they should be “modelling positive masculinity”. As a comedy fan, few things annoy me more than comedians thinking that their role is to be oracles of wisdom more than to be, you know, funny. (Was Norm Macdonald nice? I hope so. But it’s more important that he was hilarious.)
“Positive role models” should be in young people’s lives. Granted, there is not much that the state can do to ensure that young people have more familial and fraternal influences. But most of us have at least some responsibility here, inasmuch as most of us know young people. I can spew hundreds of thousands of words about the meaning of life across the internet — and perhaps it will have some small amount of impact on the world. But perhaps it won’t have as much impact as trying to be in my nephews’ lives — to the extent, of course, that that is a good thing.
